The key statistics from the annual British social attitudes survey? Never mind the stats for the minute, the overall point is that Labour is toast: 32% identified themselves as Conservative, compared with 27% who identified as Labour. The Tories haven't been the declared party of choice in 20 years. Even before we started voting Labour, we used to pretend we were going to.

Otherwise, there is good news for homosexuals and unmarried couples who cohabit (I can't believe anyone really minded us in the first place – but even the impulse to pretend to object has waned). And there is bad news for the underprivileged: increased toleration around mostly sociosexual mores comes apparently unaccompanied by any of the more traditional leftwing values. Only 38% of people now believe that a government ought to create a more equal society, down from 51% in pre-New Labour 1994, and the notion that a government ought to redistribute wealth now holds true for only 49% of Labour supporters (68% in 1994).

It feels like walking through David Cameron's psychedelic dreamscape. Finally, the people of Britain are recast in his image. We're right on, but we're still Conservatives. It's interesting that politicians constantly ascribe to the media the power to change people's attitudes; and the media readily if tacitly accepts the accusation. But the research just isn't there to support it – the "media" can't change anything, it is too diffuse. At the most it can have an impact on setting an agenda.

Conversely, politicians can and do change attitudes. But because they are clots, they often change them too far in the other guy's direction. John Curtice, author of the report's chapter on redistribution, remarks: "In repositioning itself ideologically, New Labour has helped ensure that British public opinion now has a more conservative character." This is underlined by pan-European comparisons: in Norway and France, a strong political left is echoed in more radical public attitudes.

And yet, something about holding New Labour wholly responsible sticks in the throat. You can imagine them being pleased. You can imagine Tony Blair chortling about it on the way home from the Chilcot inquiry, and Peter Mandelson, hearing that he and his chums alone stopped decades of redistributive zeal, feeling intensely relaxed.

And there's an ethical equation behind this that I can't believe New Labour either wanted or would have been ­capable of: the juxtaposition of an easy-going liberal morality with a growing intolerance for the poor is more than a curiosity. In the binary 80s and early 90s, the left played nice, championing the underdog, whether that meant minority interests or class war. The right played horrid, championing each for himself, and that generally meant a white, middle-class him. The idea that identity politics – the struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia – might be in conflict with class struggle had plenty of currency among 70s academics, but none at all in British politics, where you were either nice or horrid.

Blair's triangulation was this fabled meritocracy, a feelgood creed where we don't have to be locked in eternal struggle, we just all try our best and end up minted. This took hold – in a study about social equality conducted last year by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 69% of respondents agreed with the statement: "There is enough opportunity for virtually everyone to get on in life if they really want to. It comes down to the individual and how much you are motivated." Without that (pretty groundless) faith in mobility, many of these newly revealed, hostile attitudes to the poor – for instance, only one in five of us now believes that unemployment benefits are too low and cause hardship (53%, 16 years ago) – would be untenable.

Yet this isn't just Blair's vision – all the equal-opportunities arguments of the past 20 years have been meritocratic: we should be treated equally because we all, regardless of our gender or race or sexual orientation, might be as good as one another; as intelligent, as socially useful, as talented. This stands up, and becomes mainstream, because it's self-evidently true. The language of meaningful leftwing politics is different – we should be treated equally, made equal, because unequal societies cannot flourish. It doesn't matter whether we're talented or deserving – indeed, the less talented we are, the more we deserve – it merely matters that inequality is stamped out. It was the strategic genius of the third way to disentangle these strands of justice, but now we need a fourth way, to knit them back together.

The unbelievable thing is that, even in this mulch of conservatism, this belief that the poor are poor on purpose, 67% of people still think it is the government's responsibility to reduce income differences between rich and poor. As soon as you put the word "redistribution" in the question, everybody's suddenly against it.

But with a basically equivalent question about income gap, two thirds of people don't want to live in an unequal society. They don't, furthermore, think that's up to God, or chance, or fate – they think it's up to the government. So this actually isn't Cameron's lucky day at all. There's not much concrete planning for narrowing the income gap in the Labour manifesto, but none at all in the Tories'. It's almost amazing how much we've changed under New Labour, but it's more amazing still how much we haven't.